The 6 year old: “Hey Mum did you hear me? I said there’s really no such thing as future tenses. All future tenses are conditional tenses, really, because just because you say something is going to happen or you’ll do something doesn’t ACTUALLY mean it’s going to happen.” Me: *blink blink*
Wow! What a smart child!
...at 6??
Your child sounds just like 1 of my grandkids (who’s 14 now). You’re in for a RIDE. An extraordinarily interesting and fun ride. Enjoy 😊
From the mouths of babes..🤯
Smart kid!
This actually sounds like a derivation of an observation that English (technically) has no future tense because the strictest definition of "tense" involves inflection. Instead, English uses helping verbs which (again, technically) change the mood, not the tense.
The irony, and the place of its similarity, is that the "will" helping verb is the marker of the *intentional* mood. So in English, when we speak of future time, we are (technically) saying "I intend to do/I demand that the future be this way..."
I want to be that 6 year old when I grow up.
Sure it does. “We all will die” That will actually happen
Unless we circumvent death between now and the last death of all of us alive right now.
Touché But that would be an example of future tense using your 6 year olds definition 😁
inshallah
Wow! This will be a fun ride for you! I’m in the middle of one of those. Solidarity!
Way to go, Mum!!! You made that kid!!! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 🥇
Smart kid! Girl?
Your kiddo sounds like my kind of grammar nut! I love it! Grammar& philosophy, whoda thunk?
Except: "we will all die" but maybe that one would be a downer for a six year old.
My five year old says stuff like this. They are starting to question mortality at these ages 😭
Five years is when they start to differentiate reality from fiction. This is why telling a child younger than five that something they see on TV is not real is hard to comprehend. If they see it they think it is real. Around age five they gain the concept of "pretend."
Yep he’s deep in creative play pretend now. But you know, every so often ask about dead relatives. “How old will I be when I die?” Stuff that gets real tricky to answer
I'm sorry! Is your child the actual reincarnation of Buddha?
Schooled
My correspondence appears to be woefully insipid. *blink blink* Alas.
Smart
Wow.
Related: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophet...
This is relevant to my interests.
Time to introduce the term “irrealis.” But also, self-defense strategies bc that kid is gonna get wedgied for sure.
Shout out to my big brother for protecting me from much-deserved wedgies throughout my childhood.
Kid's ready to be introduced to neo-Reichenbachian tense and aspect theory!
Well, all that uncertainty certainly makes the future tense…